Are American women generally "anti-boy"?

It is now common knowledge that there is a strong anti-male trend in the U.S. This trend now seems to have spilled over into the sentiments of many mothers. I was perusing yahoo questions when I came across these sobering statements by mothers and women about their HATRED of boy babies.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 858AAOur2t
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 739AAtWLKW
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 140AAMT0OJ
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 930AAYWhWm
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 040AAzpU0Z
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 933AAHRMGD
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 725AAhVcuR

There are dozens of posts like that. The ones in which women want a son or prefer one is small by comparison. There was even a recent case of a mother who neglected her sons to the point of death. "Susan Gensiak doted on her daughters but did not love her sons, who were 'not allowed to eat.' She wanted girls. She didn't want boys,' the relative said."
http://articles.mcall.com/2013-06-20/ne ... d-son-help
According to the following link,
http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/articles.php?aid=1315
women, and even men, now overwhelmingly prefer to adopt females over males. The trend is so bad, many available boys are passed up, while women and men stand in line for girls, who are snatched up immediately. There are usually different reasons given for the preference: we have all sons and now want a daughter; we have all daughters and now want a female playmate for them. But it all seems to be the same reason, under a different guise. For if there are different reasons given for the same thing in such overwhelming numbers, often it's really just the same reason in disguise. One woman sums up the real reason and states her dismay at the devastating consequences for male babies and children:
"As the mother of a beautiful and loving adoptive son, I find this phenomenon of parents preferring girls to be tragic. Boys have been devalued for decades now, especially since the 1990's. The rampant negativity and vilification of boys in the media and in our culture and the over-celebration of girls is having tragic and life-crushing consequences for these boys who are left dreaming about and wishing for forever families. I adopted a beautiful boy when he was 11 from the foster care system, and now he is 18. He is the most wonderful gift life has ever bestowed upon me. Unschooling and natural, connection-based parenting is what allows for the loving bond, not gender" (ibid.).
Granted, the trend is usually the opposite for China and places like India, which prefer boys over girls. I actually deplore such tragic consequences for girls in such situations. But is not the same thing happening to boys in the West? Please read the links before you answer.
Women: do you hate males or boys? Do you relate to these women following this trend? What are your thoughts, both men and women, about the utterly tragic toll this is taking on the lives of boys? Do you think it's justified? Overdone? Exaggerated? Untrue? Not enough? Tragic? A crisis? Great? What are your thoughts?
Thank you.

My apologies for any who are having trouble with most of my links, which seem to be broken. For that reason, I wanted to delete this question and try again, but I can't find the delete option. Some of the links work, and I'll try to re-submit any that don't in the later reponses. Sorry.

There's definitely some truth in what you are saying. My father was always very anti-boy and that trend has probably gotten worse in recent years. I think the main factor causing this is that fathers don't have good relationships with their children anymore and due to the high divorce rate many of these children from divorced families are poisoned mentally by their mother's negative attitudes toward their father because the mother feels bitter over the divorce which turns the children anti-boy. The reason why my father hated boys was because his dad was a drunk who constantly insulted him. Thus, my father grew up worshiping women and hating men.

KevinG31 wrote:There's definitely some truth in what you are saying. My father was always very anti-boy and that trend has probably gotten worse in recent years. I think the main factor causing this is that fathers don't have good relationships with their children anymore and due to the high divorce rate many of these children from divorced families are poisoned mentally by their mother's negative attitudes toward their father because the mother feels bitter over the divorce which turns the children anti-boy. The reason why my father hated boys was because his dad was a drunk who constantly insulted him. Thus, my father grew up worshiping women and hating men.

I'm disappointed some my links seemed to have failed. I'm tempted to re-submit with the links intact, as they make the point more eloquently than my expositions ever could. In any case, you were able to see what I was saying even without them (based on your experience alone). In one of the links, a women is getting an abortion because it was a son. I think the causes for the anti-boy sentiment is partly due to media distortions about boys and men. What is most tragic about this is the fact that boys are admittedly more innocent of the two (i.e., men and boys). The fact very that they have been dragged into this and have become targets suggests that the thinking on the part of many is that the fault is intrinsic to the nature of maleness itself (I will avoid the word masculinity) and not some societal cause. In other words, they seem to be male-haters as such (just by virtue of the fact). I grew up with anti-male sentiments myself, and I'm a male. I didn't even wish to grow up because I thought all males were evil. As a result, I struggled with anorexia, because I did not wish to grow into an oppressor of women by default (i.e., by virtual definition of my "maleness"). Now I realize that my feelings of self-hatred were actually subtle by-products of my culture, without quite knowing why at the time. I really never thought that the man's man image, against which I rebelled (I'm gay), was ever the answer. But conservatives push it as if it were. I don't think that helps matters, because it reinforces the very images society was rebelling against in the first place. I think it is a myth that males cannot be nurturers and cargivers, but the ultimate irony about all this is this: in bashing males like many are doing, they are inadvertantly undermining the very nurturing maternal qualities that many females harbor towards male (and female) offspring that they wish to affirm in the process of doing so. They undermine what they are attempting to affirm! This whole matter is beset with ironies throughout.

I really don't feel the "anti-boy" or male hating sentiment. If there is any, it's not something as deeply ingrained in our culture as sexism against women is.

Also, women are the ones who have to be pregnant for 9 months and then give birth, and then they're stuck with the kid for 18 years. So they should have the right to express a preference for the gender of their baby. And I wouldn't blame any woman for preferring a daughter, someone who they can raise to be like them. My mother really wanted a baby to dress up in cute clothes. Sometimes it's just as simple as that...

skeleton-countess wrote:I really don't feel the "anti-boy" or male hating sentiment. If there is any, it's not something as deeply ingrained in our culture as sexism against women is.

Society's anti-male stance succinctly summed up right here.

"If there is any."

As if two cannot suffer. Such a travesty.

Well, everyone suffers. No doubt about that.

The question is whether boys suffer just for being born male.

skeleton-countess wrote:Well, everyone suffers. No doubt about that.

The question is whether boys suffer just for being born male.

Apparently, some do, as some mothers don't want them. It would be bad if the same thing happened to a girl, and I will never condone any refusal to love a child based on something so flimsy as gender. I deplore that that happens in some of those Eastern countries. The question is, is the same thing happening here, only to another gender? Are women in America now rejecting their sons, and opting only for daughters? Any time you have a trend that rejects one gender over against another, invariably the population is affected. No more sons, no more daughters; no more daughters, no more sons. It therefore seems that the higher moral ground is to accept what nature (or "God," if you're religious) has given you, without hating your child.
But I respect your opinion: which is that it's overblown or non-existent. OK, that's what I wnat to find out. I'm a liberal, but in condemning the oppression of females, I have sometimes thought that many feminists take it to the next level: hatred of one gender. I support feminism, except when it comes to that. I grew up hating the fact that I'm male, and saw myself as a de facto oppressor because of it. However, enough is enough. If women really feel this way in significant numbers, it'll be the death of us all. You need two genders to make one: some women need to start seeing that.

There are any number of metrics you could measure by.

Grade school drop out rates?
College drop out rates?
Unemployment rates?
Suicide rates?
Workplace fatality rates?
Homelessness rates?

All are male dominated statistics despite being a smaller portion of the population.

Nuance wrote:There are any number of metrics you could measure by.

Grade school drop out rates?
College drop out rates?
Unemployment rates?
Suicide rates?
Workplace fatality rates?
Homelessness rates?

All are male dominated statistics despite being a smaller portion of the population.

There's a paper that was published about that by a woman, Christina Sommers.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/examiner- ... le/2541265
In it, she demonstrates that the gender most in danger today is the male gender. I'm a liberal, and sadly this issue of male bashing is often most attacked in the conservative camps, which hijack the issue in order to re-establish old norms. I believe society's empowerment of women is a good thing. But I think taking it too far proves just as detrimental to the fabric of soceity, or at least the well being of the populace as a whole, as the other extreme had. This self-evident trend accounts for why so many males are now being marginalized and alienated. Nowhere is this more poignant than in our judicial system, which routinely goes far harder on males than females. They actually have a mandate to do this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ences.html
This has fueled conservative antipathy towards women, which is an unfortunate consequence. I have always condemned mysogyny, and have traditionally gone soft on misandry. I'm a liberal, who feels that the violation of women's rights in China, et al, and Islamic countries, is a human crisis and should be denounced vehemently. But it seems to me that the feminine backlash is taking matters too far when they go so far as to acually hate and abuse their sons on a grand scale out of wholesale disgust for an entire gender, without which they themselves wouldn't even BE here. They are just as much the product of their fathers as they are their mothers; as are their sons. When I read about girls abusing and despising their sons just because they can't dress them up like dolls, or women killing their sons for being male (it DOES happen), it depresses me, because I'm attracted to males, despite my self-loathing. In particular (don't condemn me), I'm attracted to boys, mostly in adolescence. It's very distressing for me to read that feminists may be encouraging the annihilation of male youth, just because it doesn't suit their palate. Carried out in large numbers, this is bound to demoralize or depopulate whole populations in time. China had to modify its one child policy for that very reason.
What hurts most, perhaps, is that I'm liberal, and it's my own liberal cohorts that have encouraged this destructive trend and downplayed its existence.
Remember "A house divided..."? -Abraham Lincoln.